“This is one of those Facebook memes that keeps circling around the universe. I answered it on Facebook, but since some of you might not have access to my Facebook account, I thought I’d post the results here.

‘The BBC believes the majority of people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Go to your profile, choose notes, post a new note – copy and edit.

Instructions: Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.'”

Mark goes ahead and checks off the books he’s read on the list. It’s more than 6. The list is below, but hang here with me for a second.

Before you get your feathers ruffled about the audacity and snobbery of the BBC, let’s take a better look at this.

I looked for the origin of the meme by checking urban-myth-busting site Snopes and the BBC website. Snopes had nothing about how the BBC supposedly claimed that most people will have read only 6 books on the entire list. Snopes usually catches rumors quickly, but they don’t necessarily investigate every silly Facebook meme. Personally, I doubt the BBC would have said that, but let’s be honest: They’ve said worse.

On the BBC site I found no quotes, articles, or any mention whatsoever about the 6 book number; I did find the BBC’s BIG READ list where they list 100 books and they ask UK’ers to vote on their favorites. Both the list from the Facebook meme and the BBC’s Big Read list look similar. Could they be the same list?

So I stuck them in a spreadsheet and compared. 63 of the books are shared; 37 of the books are not.

You’ll notice some of the book titles are written slightly differently, which implies more editing by the clever meme maker (who’ll we’ll refer to as the Facebook Meme Maker -FMM) that adjusted the original BBC list. (With the Facebook Meme’s “Harry Potter Series” entry, I just used the first Harry Potter book. Same with “The Faraway Tree Collection.” In a list of 100 books, it’s confusing to reference a series.)

So this table (click on it then zoom in to see better) contains the 63 shared titles. That means 37 titles were deleted and new ones added by the Facebook Meme Maker.

Here are the remaining 37 titles from the Facebook meme next to the original 37 from BBC list (click to embiggen):

Seems like FMM preferred more American authors and books that were later adapted into successful movies. Maybe FMM heard some rumor that the BBC was dissing American authors and readers and felt like putting some of her/his own favorites on the list. Who knows?

But this meme has some of the great signs of a viral commodity:

1. The meme’s subject is elitist in that it says something about the user’s level of intelligence. (“What? You haven’t read War and Peace?!) This fosters (usually friendly) competition amongst friends.

2. The meme has a whiff of injustice that stirs up indignance. (“How DARE the BBC say that?! GIMME THAT LIST!”)

3. Filling out / answering the meme doesn’t take much time. “Put an X by the books you’ve read.”

4. 100 books is perfect. A nice, big milestone number. “16 Things” (which I filled out) didn’t take off on Facebook but “25 Things” did. People gravitate toward milestone, lucky, and zero-ending numbers in this culture. No-one will look at an “82 Books You Need to Read” list. “100” grabs everyone’s attention.

The FMM probably saw the BBC list and wondered how many of the books she/he had actually read. Out of curiosity, the FMM checked off which book titles were familiar. Perhaps when the number of recognized titles were low, the FMM decided to add the ones she/he did in fact read. What followed was an email or two, with bragging evidence attached, of course, to a few dozen friends on Facebook. Voila! A meme is born.

People who successfully ignore memes will be sucked into this one for the false academic quality of it. It’s about traditional literacy; We all take the “How Well Read Are You?” measurement quite seriously.

I myself am trying to work on being better read. With all the hype about how the internet and tv are melting our brains, this meme is a zinger. It feeds all the fear surrounding the changes in our culture. It will most likely take off and get so big that Snopes will have to post on it.

Now you know how memes like this start. And you also know why I’m not going to be sucked in. It’s a hoax created by a smart FMM who blended some pop culture news story from half-way across the world into a pride-ruffling insult that must be disproved immediately by the educated American masses. Have fun with it if you like, but please don’t spread the indignant attitude. Reading itself should be a positive and inclusive activity.

____________________________________

UPDATE 17 November 2010: Please read through the comments, there is a lot of new information scattered in there. Thanks.

UPDATE: OCTOBER 24, 2012 This meme is still going strong. The list is changing a bit, but it is still basically the same. If you want to figure out why you or others waste so much time doing unproductive things like Facebook, you can check out this book: The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg*.

Great point, David, about “Alice in Wonderland” … The Wonderland of the
Internet, indeed. Series books and books named like “Teenage Wasteland” should
be big warning signs. Good for you on the Google search. We need to spread the
word about how running a simple search is a necessary step in the use of the
Internet. Thanks.

hi, i’m a long time internet user and the term meme is not a “little chain-letter-like game that people send around the internet”. I’ve never seen it formally defined but the definition would be close to; an idea or theme that is virally duplicated by many sources spawning different variations but remaining more or less true to its original.

and then you can go into meme merging and other such things but thats not what i’m concerned with.

True. I write for beginners, though, and I needed a definition that fit this
meme. Memes started out in email, replicating the chain-letters that went around
in snail mail. That’s the history of the word. There can be multiple definitions
and usages of words, so I think my definition in this context would definitely
be one of the entries in a formal definition.

It’s surprising to me how many people are deeply concerned about this particular
word. I keep meaning to start another post to deal with it…

The history of the word is actually that it was invented by Richard Dawkins in 1976, so if you want a formal definition your best bet is to read what he said when he coined the word in The Selfish Gene:

a meme is “a unit of cultural inheritance, hypothesized as analogous to the particulate gene and as naturally selected by virtue of its ‘phenotypic’ consequences on its own survival and replication in the cultural environment.”

Or to put it more simply, it is a fragment of culture – something like a story, idea, belief or behaviour pattern – that is pased from one person to another by copying, imitation or teaching. It can be pased via email or the internet, but it certainly doesn’t have to be. Cinderella; whether you greet people with ‘Hello’, ‘How ya doing’, or ‘Hi'; how you hold and use a knife when you’re eating – these are all memes. Internet memes – such as book lists or amusing cat videos – are a very small and recent subset.

I am surprised that you’re so surprised that people are deeply concerned about the severely limited scope of your definition of a meme given that your entire article was written to debunk a lie and express your contempt for the deceiver.

Susie B has set the record straight for what a meme is below and I think she deserves your gratitude. Perhaps your mistake could have been overlooked in a way that the author of the books list could not due to your lack of intent, but you have continually defended yourself in the face of easily obtainable evidence to the contrary. Wasn’t it you who wrote below, “Why purport to be academic in your conjecture when you’ve not done the least bit of research?”

Just apologize for your mistake and make a correction. It’s that simple and then perhaps more people will go read Dawkins.

Ha! Ha! Just like you said this is now doing the rounds of my old uni friends and yes there is an element of competition especially between the scientists ( we need to prove we can read something other than a textbook) and the linguists ( who always felt they were superior to us!! )
I noticed the penchant for books into films on the FB list but as I am so strange in my reading habits discovered to my delight that I am so well read I should be at Oxford!
We are all soooo gullible – we really need to feel we are doing OK by some standard or other. I tottally agree – redaing shlud be for enjoyment not because you ought to have “done” a worthy book.
As I disappear into The Hemlock Cup – Bettany Hughes book about Socrates which is great but not exactly bedtime reading; and listen to Percy Jackson and the Titan’s curse…..books are a joy!

I love listening to books, by the way. I LOVED the Harry Potter series on CD. I
had read the books, and hearing them read was amazing. Also, the actor that read
Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy was superb.

But yes, back to being sucked in, in a negative way… we are all so, SO
gullible, as you said. Maybe it’s old media tradition, how we all just were
trained to believe what we read in the paper. I find the older generations are
even worse at this. For example, I remember when we had to explain something to
my inlaws about rehearsal dinners, specifically that it was traditional to allow
wedding party members to bring one guest to the rehearsal dinner. They didn’t
believe us until we showed them a paragraph stating so in a wedding etiquette
book. Nowadays, you can get any book that says any darn thing that suits your
needs, especially if you print off some of the self-published drivel in the
non-fiction section of any e-book store.

And now that the conglomerates behind traditional news sources have been
revealed, it’s more and more evident that we must find original sources
ourselves. Seeing something printed and re-printed makes no difference any more.
We must find trusted sources and make judgments based on those and any other
source. This is a flawed system, of course, but we don’t have much choice.

I’m glad you are one of the people that does look for original info. In doing so
myself, I found that this meme held a false claim, and I could then let others
know to stop the culture war they were beginning to wage in their heads against
the BBC. God help us when false information leads to real wars… oh wait… God
help us now.

Daire, yes it seems as though a list was in The Guardian over two years ago, but it was not the same list. Plus, don’t think that paper claimed that people have read only 6.
Sent from Yahoo! Mail on Android

Mmm – I came to this list only recently and sure enough despite ‘never’ doing this kind of survey, I took it and have been just a bit obsessed since – even though I know that this is far from the only ‘top 100 books list’ out there and definitely not the UK and possibly young reader biased BBC list of favourites from 2003 ‘Big read’ (which actually goes up to 200 anyway). So despite the fact it is silly I’m now up to 93 titles on the list (do I really need to know so much about the 19th C sperm whaling industry?) and am just a bit troubled about how I’m going to go about reading the whole Bible to achieve 100…

LOL Hi Strange Mother.
You sound like you should make your own 100 books lists! Why not write us up one
for young adult, kids, adults, and classics, with international books? You seem
very well read.

I grew up in Catholic school so I’ve read the entire Bible in depth. Some parts
many times. Psalms is probably the best written, the Gospel of Luke probably the
least fact-based. Anyway, I’m good. 12 years of it was enough.

Please make some notes and get back to us! I totally understand your obsession,
as the Pulitzer list is just as random and I feel like I should read all of
those.

Wow, some of you are having a really hard time understanding this. Either that,
or this commenter did not read through the comments.

I posit that there are not enough words to sufficiently address the current
needs of the tech community. Meme, to me, denotes participation. “Viral internet
phenomenon” is not a meme, although “meme” is being applied to that definition.
One could postulate that watching or even just receiving a meme is in fact
participation, and I get that, but we need a word that includes the definition
of more active involvement instead of passive participation. One other could
postulate that meme is a word with multiple definitions. I say we all agree to
this, for now.

I suggest you read more of my blog and the comments before you comment on blog
posts.

I really tought abaut what you´re saying when I answered that, there was some titles that I ask “why is this here?” But I thoght the list with that kind of literature could be more opened to that ones who read only bestsellers, no matter if they´re great books, self-help sells lots of books. But it´s interesting to just remember that television is not the only thing that exist in the world. Your text is very cleaver and really makes us think about reading. Congratulations.

yeah it is screwy, listing series of books instead of one book, etc. It’s probably gone through a bunch of iterations. Probably each person who got it added books they’ve read and deleted some they didn’t!

Who the heck knows what “good literature” is anyway? I think that the list is close enough to agree that its origins are the BBC list. It’s easier for a list to degrade over time from it’s original rather than a random list growing over time to correlate with another list by 63%.

Then again, the BBC list which provided the origin for the meme never claimed to be a list of good literature anyway – merely a list of favourite books. In that case, I find it more surprising that so many works of “good literature” (subjectively speaking, of course!) did make it into the list – unless it was because the repsondants were attempting to prove themselves well-read (and were, perhaps lying – as per your other BBC web link). Then again, I can say that 1984, Animal Farm and Catch-22 are three of my favourite books ever, so I guess that there is a chance that the list is a reasonably accurate reflection of Britain’s favourite books, rather than a list of what Britons believe ought to be their favourite books…. 😉

And you know, there is a ton of literature out there that isn’t noticed by the
mass market. Also, if a book gets to a level of real difficulty (like I’m
finding Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude), it won’t make any meme
lists. You know why? Because the people who have read it won’t brag about it.
They are at an educated level that allows them the appreciation and tolerance of
differences. I find people who spread mems like this fall into two categories:
well-meaning types who are in general fun and curious types if not a bit
ignorant of the implications of spreading this kind of meme; and the other more
nefarious type: the hacks. They are mediocre in their knowledge yet deem
themselves superior anyway. That kind of exclusive and
not-supported-by-actual-expertise attitude is a major pet peeve of mine. I see
those people as screaming “I’M IGNORANT” when they spread stuff like this.
No-one of real intelligence ever brags about how well-read they are, because the
more you read, the more you know about what you haven’t read and couldn’t
possibly read in your lifetime, and to claim that you are “well-read” is a true
sign that you’re ignorant of other cultures, history, and the vast, vast world
of literature.

I totally agree, and the funny thing is that much of the literature not noticed by the mass market, has come so close. You can take virtually any prestigious book award, and the mass market will know about at least the winner, if not also at least a couple of the runners up. Even if they never read these books, they will associate them with great literature. But there will be many books that almost made it, and were recognised by the various award committees, but may never be recognised by the mass market.
Similarly, it is these winners and runners up which remain known for years afterward, and this longevity keeps them in top book lists for ever after. Yet the winner one year may conceivably have been only a runner up another year. Surely it is virtually impossible for any award committee to be completely objective and to be consistent year after year after year.